If You Like Music, There May Be a Ford in Your Future

As viewers get ready for another new television season, they are also being asked to look beyond the traditional sources for new series and watch shows online.

A case in point is “The Rider Challenge,” a reality competition show being sponsored by the Ford division of the Ford Motor Company to help sell the 2014 Fiesta subcompact. Plans call for 18 episodes of “The Rider Challenge” to begin on Sept. 30 and run into November. The episodes, each five minutes long, will be available on a section of a Web site belonging to the producer of the show, Live Nation Entertainment.

A teaser video to promote “The Rider Challenge” is going live this week. The clip sets up the premise of the show: Six teams, each composed of two people, will compete against each other in a race to find must-have items that five musical acts specify in their contract riders, also known as backstage riders or tour riders — the requests (or demands) that performers make as conditions for their concerts at an arena, theater or stadium.

“Would you have what it takes?” the teaser asks, presenting snippets of scenes from the webisodes in which contestants rush around and make remarks like “I’m scared that they’re going to be there before we are,” “We’re already far behind” and “Wide open, buddy.”

The teams will drive new Ford Fiestas as they seek the rider items, with the color of each car matching the T-shirts worn by the members of each team.

“The Rider Challenge” represents the entry of Live Nation Entertainment into the realm of content marketing, also known as branded content and branded entertainment. The goal of content marketing is to keep consumers around for the advertisers’ pitches by incorporating them into what is being watched, read or listened to rather than following the traditional model of interrupting the content with commercials or ads.

Content marketing is a modern-day version of what advertisers did from the 1920s through the 1960s on radio and television, when they wove product peddling into the plots of shows. Ford Motor took part through programs like “The Ford Television Theater” and “The Lively Ones.”

Ford Motor has also been supporting more recent efforts at content marketing, like “American Idol,” which features Ford cars in episodes along with the products of two other sponsors, AT&T and Coca-Cola. The budget for “The Rider Challenge"is estimated at $5 million.

It is no coincidence that “The Rider Challenge,” like “American Idol,” is focused on music. “Our Fiesta target really loves music,” said Crystal Worthem, brand content and alliances manager at the Ford division of Ford Motor in Dearborn, Mich., referring to first-time car buyers, predominantly millennials, consumers in their teens through around age 30.

Previous partnerships between Ford and Live Nation involved “sponsoring a concert tour, sponsoring a venue,” Ms. Worthem said. “There was more infrastructure, trucks on the road with cars.”

The Web series answers the challenge of “how do you take that type of engagement to millions of people instead of thousands,” she added. “It takes that relationship into our sweet spot right now, branded content.”

“It was important for us to have a mix of different types of artists and different genres,” Ms. Worthem said, because the millennial generation, also called Generation Y, likes a broad range of musical styles.

Also, many millennials prefer to listen to up-and-coming bands along with — or even instead of -- “top talent,” she added.

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A scene from "The Rider Challenge," a marketing campaign sponsored by Ford.

There is a discovery element to the choice of musicians, Ms. Worthem says, in that Ford and Live Nation hope viewers of the Web series “may discover an artist they may not have in their rotation” of favorite performers.

“The Rider Challenge” is under the aegis of a division at Live Nation Entertainment known as Live Nation Media and Sponsorship. “We launched in January, as we relaunched livenation.com, which had been an e-commerce site,” said Russell Wallach, president of the division.

The Web site was made over, Mr. Wallach said, because content was “the No. 1 thing a lot of our bands were looking for.”

“We wanted to create this robust place for music fans to come to not only buy tickets but also to see videos, photo galleries and custom content with artist interviews and performances,” he added.

The new division is intended to build upon the “branded events” that Live Nation has created for years for marketers like Bud Light, Pop Tarts and Samsung, Mr. Wallach said.

In discussions that began in December, “we originally had this idea for a music version of the M.L.B. Fan Cave,” he said, referring to an initiative by Major League Baseball that offers fans experiences in person, online and in social media. The centerpiece is a building in Lower Manhattan, called the Fan Cave, where fans selected by the league watch every game played during each baseball season.

That idea was discarded, Mr. Wallach said, because “nobody would want to sit in a room and watch live concerts,” adding, “Concerts are all about the experience of going to a show.”

After that, the concept morphed into one that would be focused on “bands on the road,” Mr. Wallach said. Then “we got together with Ford, and Ford suggested it would be more interesting if we created it more in the vein of a reality competition,” he added.

“Fans who go every year to see live concerts, for the most part, never get to see what’s going on behind the scenes,” Mr. Wallach said. “This is about giving them a bit of an insight.”

Mr. Wallach’s division then “refined the idea, fine-tuned it,” he added, “figuring out who the artists would be and how to market the show, using all the collective assets” of Ford and Live Nation, in realms that include paid, earned and owned media channels.

Mr. Wallach said he is pleased enough with how “The Rider Challenge” is turning out that “we’re already looking at the next version of this,” which may not be on livenation.com.

The division has “two or three other shows we’re working on,” he added, that are also in the vein of taking “portions of the incredible content and experience happening at a live event and sharing that with millions and millions of people who aren’t there.”

The grand prize for the winning team in “The Rider Challenge” is a Ford Fiesta and what is called a Live Nation Ultimate Access Pass, offering all-access entrance to all the concerts that Live Nation stages for a year.

The Ford division is incorporating into the Web series another marketing campaign for the Fiesta, known as the Fiesta Movement, which recruits 100 young drivers -- “agents,” in the campaign’s parlance — to help introduce the car through blogs and other social media.

Several agents will be part of the Web series in cameo roles, Ms. Worthem said, “serving as a ‘lifeline'” to the teams trying to “finish fulfilling their missions.”

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